|
British police said on Friday that they had arrested a second
teenager in connection with the breach at TalkTalk, which may
have led to the theft of personal data from among the company's
more than 4 million customers.
TalkTalk was not the first such incident, but traders and
investors said it should re-ignite interest in companies
offering protection against hack attacks.
Market research firm Gartner has estimated that global spending
on IT security is set to increase 8.2 percent in 2015 to $77
billion. Corporations around the world will spend $101 billion
on information security in 2018, Gartner says.
That has caught the attention of financial markets. The ISPY
exchange-traded-fund, which lets investors hold a basket of
cyber security stocks - such as Cisco Systems and Sophos Group -
has risen around 3 percent.
"As cyber crime continues to grow, governments and companies are
prioritising cyber security as an essential investment. This is
a sector we can expect to dominate headlines and corporate
budgets," said Kris Monaco, the head of ISE ETF Ventures.
Others focused on some relatively small British stocks whose
shares have risen, in contrast to those of TalkTalk whose stock
has fallen 6 percent in the last week.
Falanx Group has climbed 15 percent over that same period. NCC
Group and Corero Network Security - an offshoot of the former
Corero software business - have risen 3 percent.
Corero's products include software that protects against attacks
on Internet sites and domain addresses.
NCC has similar services, including one to test how vulnerable a
company is to "phishing" - where internal emails are hacked by
someone posing as an employee or outside contact - while Falanx
has services monitoring clients' computer infrastructure for
signs of suspicious activity.
John Blamire, a former British Army officer who is chief
executive at Falanx, said customer interest had risen since the
attack on TalkTalk.
"Incidents such as the one at TalkTalk actively brings attention
to organizations such as ours," he said.
To be sure, stocks such as these would carry the usual risks
associated with "small cap" stocks with a relatively small
market valuation - less liquidity, which can then make them more
prone to a slump and harder to sell than bigger stocks.
Nevertheless, they have attracted some big-name investment
houses, with Liontrust Asset Management holding a near 10
percent stake in NCC while Blackrock Investment Management has a
near 3 percent holding in Corero. Both Liontrust and Blackrock
declined to comment on those holdings.
Mark Slater, chief investment officer at Slater Investments,
holds around 3 million NCC shares in his company's portfolio,
and he expected NCC and others to continue to grow.
"The nature of the Internet makes it open to attack. These
problems are not going to go away."
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Lionel Laurent, Larry
King)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
